This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Introducing Strategic Wealth Management

I persuaded my family that we needed to take a disciplined and coordinated approach to what I call "strategic wealth management." Strategic wealth management is a philosophy and approach to wealth building that involves a number of key components—defining values; setting investment goals; deciding on a time horizon for wealth management planning (your lifetime or multiple generations); asset, liability, and cash flow management; control of spending; wealth transfer; and, tax and risk mitigation—all coordinated in a strategic, synchronized way that results in the whole being worth more than the sum of the parts. Strategic wealth management is a comprehensive approach to managing wealth productively where synergies come from careful planning and from leveraging a family's assets in purposeful ways not just for a lifetime, but, in our case, for multiple generations.

As a group, we focused on the values that we thought should drive the future management of our wealth. We talked about our family's shared heritage—a heritage built on hard work, persistence, personal flint, and private Quaker faith. We also discussed our tolerance for entrepreneurial risk-taking, expectations for earned income, our desire for investment income, and our long-term goals for the future, both as individuals and as a family. The overriding questions in all these discussions were these: did we want to go broke—slowly and with certainty? Or did we want to take measured and educated risks with the potential benefit of growing our wealth and that of our children?